Normalizing activism and marginalizing radical youth in Spain’s post-15M social movements

Abstract

In this article I compare the different forms of participation of young anti-capitalists in two post-15M Spanish social movements in Lleida: White Tide and Platform of those Affected by Mortgages. The objective of the article is to analyze how biopolitical normalization processes work within social movements themselves. The article explains the normalization processes that adult activists exercise against young anti-capitalists, and the ways in which young people resist and seek to break with these processes in post-15M movements. All this allows us to understand how this normalization affects current social movements, establishing what is seen to be the ‘correct’ way to be an activist and creating processes of marginalization and censorship of those activists who occupy non-hegemonic social positions and who use other political forms.